
D Fosse
Community Expert
D Fosse
Community Expert
Activity
‎Jun 10, 2025
09:36 PM
The hard truth is that file corruption is always caused by failing hardware.
If there is a "statistical" potential error lurking in the system, then the bigger the file, the higher the risk. Simply because any one given file passes more bytes through the process.
Not what you want to hear, but it's extremely rare that a corrupt file can be recovered. Is the file layered? If you saved it with "max compatibility" on, you can try Lightroom Classic, or an earlier Photoshop version. There's a tiny possibility that a flattened composite can still be extracted, but don't get your hopes up.
All that said, your files are unnecessarily big for the purpose. You normally don't need to scale the original for large format printing! Any good quality file will generally work at any reproduction size. The bigger it is, the farther away it will be seen from so that the eye can take in the whole image.
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‎Jun 10, 2025
09:08 PM
Show a screenshot of your PS Print dialog.
Include the printer driver dialog that comes up when you click "Print Settings". These are the settings we need to see:
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‎Jun 10, 2025
12:06 PM
1 Upvote
You can do as above to make sure everything carries over, and that's how you can get your actions back.
But in the interest of good working habits, for the future and anyone else reading, here's what I would recommend:
Always save out your actions to .atn files (and brushes to .abr), and keep them in a safe place. Then you can easily reload them, whether for an update, or in case you need to reset preferences for troubleshooting.
Do not migrate settings if you need Photoshop to always run reliably and without problems. Preferences are prone to corruption because they are rewritten on every application exit. Small errors accumulate, and new application code can bring out latent problems. Preferences contain a lot more than your own user settings, it's the entire application configuration, including lots of under-the-covers parameters.
Corrupt preferences tend to look like application bugs and are frequently mistaken for that.
Take the time to set up fresh preferences when you install a new version. It's ten minutes well spent.
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‎Jun 10, 2025
11:08 AM
3 Upvotes
Uninstall/reinstall rarely fixes anything. Completeley resetting preferences is usually what it takes. This returns the application to clean, out-of-the-box factory state. The Preferences contain a lot more than your own user settings. It's the entire application configuration, including lots of under-the-covers parameters. Corrupt preferences usually look like application bugs and are frequently mistaken for that.
Settings and preferences are rewritten on every application exit. That makes them prone to corruption from irregular shutdowns. Migrating preferences to new application code in a new version may expose latent problems from accumulated small errors.
Move the whole Photoshop Settings folder from the user account to the desktop. Next time you launch Photoshop, a fresh new Settings folder will be rebuilt. Yes, you will lose your settings, but that seems to me preferable to an application that doesn't run at all. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/preferences.html#reset-preferences
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‎Jun 09, 2025
09:48 PM
1 Upvote
Settings and preferences are rewritten on every application exit.
They are not stored with the program files, but in a separate directory in your Windows user account. When Photoshop starts, it loads its whole configuration from this Settings folder in the user account.
So there are basically two things that can cause settings to be lost:
an irregular shutdown/crash/power loss, corrupting the preferences file during rewrite
a permissions problem in your Windows user account, preventing correct write on shutdown
Uninstall/reinstall rarely fixes anything. Completeley resetting preferences is usually what it takes. This returns the application to clean, out-of-the-box factory state. Move the whole Photoshop Settings folder from the user account to the desktop. Next time you launch Photoshop, a fresh new Settings folder will be rebuilt.
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/preferences.html#reset-preferences
The Preferences contain a lot more than your own user settings. It's the entire application configuration, including lots of under-the-covers parameters. Corrupt preferences usually look like application bugs and are frequently mistaken for that.
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‎Jun 09, 2025
08:16 AM
@michaelv76180831 That's right. This is normal and by design, not a memory leak.
A memory leak would be if Photoshop went beyond the limit you set in Preferences, then went on to using up all 256 GB, leaving nothing for other processes. At this point, your whole system would choke.
Raster image editing moves huge amounts of data around. People usually blame this on Photoshop, but in reality it's just a big load of data that needs to go somewhere. Even 256 GB RAM won't be enough for big/multiple files - it needs to go to disk, aka the scratch disk.
If you want to reduce Photoshop's footprint on the system, reduce history states to 1 or 2. This will dramatically reduce the scratch file size.
The CPU doesn't have much impact, that's normally not where the bottleneck is (with one notable exception - file compression).
The parametric editing in Lightroom is much less I/O-intensive, and normally needs a lot less memory (real or virtual). On the other hand, CPU/GPU speed is more critical.
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‎Jun 09, 2025
07:14 AM
2 Upvotes
@ExUSA @Isaac_6306
Just to be clear, these are not Microsoft profiles. Microsoft just allows display manufacturers and laptop manufacturers to distribute their profiles through Windows Update. So yes, they are specific to the actual display.
They are as accurate as any generic profile can be, which is basically "ballpark". One made by a calibrator, based on actual measurement, will always be much more accurate. But the recurring problem with these profiles isn't accuracy, it's that they aren't always written to strict icc specification. That can throw off Photoshop's (and other applications') color management and result in incorrect display.
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‎Jun 08, 2025
10:40 PM
Camera processing (jpeg, HEIF) always has very aggressive noise reduction applied. This is how they sell cameras. One could argue that they overdo it to the point where the result looks "plasticky" and unnatural.
ACR shows the file as the camera sensor recorded it, with very little noise reduction applied at default settings. You're supposed to apply the noise reduction yourself; ACR doesn't do it for you. The noise reduction tools in ACR are very effective when applied carefully - with the new AI-based "Denoise" for the really tough high-ISO cases.
I don't know the ISO of this image, but generally this looks like what you might expect.
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‎Jun 08, 2025
10:15 PM
There's no doubt that this would be using two activations; that part is clear.
But can you run both activations simultaneously? As written, the terms say no - but this is probably not what they had in mind.
My gut feeling is that this wouldn't violate the "spirit" of the license. But don't quote me on it....I'd open chat and pop the question. Type "agent" to bypass the chatbot and get a real person.
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‎Jun 08, 2025
02:20 PM
I doubt anyone anticipated this scenario when they formulated the license terms. I'm not sure there even is an answer to your question.
That said, processes tend to take the time they take. They're not sitting around just for fun. And the two PS instances would need to draw from many of the same machine resources.
The CPU isn't always the bottleneck in Photoshop - writing to and reading from disk can also be what everything else is waiting for. Or the GPU. RAM isn't all that important; that's just a cache for the most current data. The full history is continuously written to the scratch disk. You can try to see if reducing history states to 1 speeds things up.
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‎Jun 08, 2025
01:19 PM
2 Upvotes
That laptop setting should really be avoided - it's a simplified and dumbed down version of a calibrator, but one that disregards how color management works and how Photoshop uses the monitor profile..
To use Photoshop with a wide gamut display, you really need a proper calibrator to make monitor profiles based on actual measurement. No wide gamut display should ever be sold without one.
The short version is that Photoshop relies on a monitor profile that describes the actual and current behavior of the display. The monitor profile is a map; and like any map it needs to describe the actual terrain, or the result will be wrong.
The monitor profile is a standard icc profile. This profile is used in a standard profile conversion, from the document profile into the monitor profile. These corrected numbers are sent to screen, thus representing the file correctly on screen.
Photoshop uses the profile it gets from the operating system when it starts up. It will continue to use this profile for the remainder of the session. If the display behavior changes, the profile is invalidated and you need a new profile that reflects that new display behavior. That also means relaunching Photoshop to load the new profile.
In short, you cannot just flip this switch in the laptop. The result will be wrong. You need to leave this switch in one or the other position, and then use a calibrator to make a profile based on that behavior.
Photoshop is the industry standard for color accuracy, but it needs a proper monitor profile to work as intended. A calibrator is really an essential piece of equipment.
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‎Jun 08, 2025
12:39 PM
2 Upvotes
Keep in mind that there is nothing in the camera that actually measures the color of the incoming light - that wouldn't work with all the mixed lighting you get in a practical situation.
The white balance doesn't refer to the light; it's just an amount of compensation. It tweaks a few dials in the processing pipeline until it looks visually neutral - or with a certain amount of blue or yellow color cast. Which dials to tweak in which proportion will vary with the processing engine.
Don't expect these numbers to have any particular accuracy to a standard reference.
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‎Jun 07, 2025
11:53 PM
1 Upvote
With ACR set to white balance "As Shot", the visual appearance of white balance will be equivalent.
The numbers won't match! They will be in the same region, but you can easily get up to a few 100K discrepancy with the same visually neutral white balance.
ACR and the Nikon camera firmware are two different raw processing engines, and they won't work the same way. To produce roughly the same visual result, very different algorithms will be used, and different input values to produce the same result.
With the "As Shot" setting, ACR prioritizes visual appearance over numbers.
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‎Jun 06, 2025
03:51 PM
Editing an action step to a new save location is very quick, just double-click the step.
The action can either use a standard Save As or Save For Web, that's your choice.
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‎Jun 06, 2025
03:46 PM
Denoise (and other AI-based algorithms) requires specialized/AI-optimized cores to run effficiently. With Nvidia, this is known as "Tensor" cores. Only the newer RTX-series has that. Don't know what the AMD equivalent is.
On GPUs without these optimized cores, Denoise will be painfully slow.
Intel has never been a serious contender in the GPU market. Maybe they just resigned to the fact that they couldn't compete with Nvidia, I don't know. But they have seemed to stick with the low-end market.
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‎Jun 06, 2025
03:35 PM
That's a defective monitor profile, which can often affect different applications differently. In fact, that's often the smoking gun.
You can see that the white point in Photoshop is far too yellow. Not just in the image, but even more clearly in the color picker (which is also color managed and uses the monitor profile).
Are you using a calibrator to make your monitor profiles? If you are, rerun it. If not, get one. In the meantime, replace your current profile with a standard profile (sRGB, Adobe RGB or Display P3). Which one depends on the type of display you have. It won't be entirely accurate, but better than a broken profile.
Defective/bad profiles from the display manufacturer are often distributed through Windows Update.
A note about screenshots: to show correct colors, you need to first assign your monitor profile, then convert to a standard color space. The original color space no longer applies, the numbers sent to screen have already been converted by Photoshop into monitor color space, but the screenshot is untagged.
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‎Jun 04, 2025
12:10 PM
I think you need to post a screenshot of the full ACR window with the settings visible, and how it opens in Photoshop.
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‎Jun 04, 2025
12:06 PM
If you look at the splash screen, it lists the sub-modules as they are loaded. So you can see which module/component is hanging.
Also, post the full Help > System Info from Photoshop.
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‎Jun 04, 2025
10:13 AM
Does it work if you convert to DNG? (edits stored in the file header, not a separate sidecar).
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‎Jun 03, 2025
06:11 AM
"Close distance" is relative. Usually that means 1 meter or so for a large banner. So already you're down to a max useful resolution around 100 ppi. And "above lockers" indicates perhaps even farther away.
(Generally, the 300 number is widely misunderstood. It's not a magic number, even for book and magazine print. The origin of that number is purely technical: using a standard halftone screen of 150 lines per inch (lpi), it's the point where individual pixels can no longer be distinguished. It will be totally masked by the line screen. In other words, it's a theoretical upper limit, it's not a lower limit. And even so, it's a smoothness limit, it's not a sharpness limit. You can go below it without losing sharpness. In fact, the sharpness is determined by the 150 lpi screen.)
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‎Jun 03, 2025
04:02 AM
There are some functions in Photoshop that use the operating system pagefile for temp storage, not the scratch disk. I didn't know about this particular one, but smart objects, some of the new AI-based functions, and anything processed in the GPU will do this. The scratch disk mainly stores "finished" history steps.
The scratch disk is purged when Photoshop closes. I'm not sure how the pagefile works in this regard, but considering that it's temp storage, I assume it's cleared when no longer needed. It will in any case be deleted on reboot, so there's no need to delete manually. The basic pagefile is 2x installed RAM (IIRC), but dynamically allocated and will expand as needed.
All that said, I would take that warning seriously. It means you really are short on disk space. Raster image editing moves huge amounts of data around, orders of magnitude more than any RAM you may have installed. It all has to go somewhere, and you need to make space for it. People usually blame Photoshop for this, but it's really just a lot of data that needs to be handled one way or another.
Cleaning out your system drive can often free up hundreds of GB. There's free software that will show you exactly what fills up your drive and where it is. I'm using WinDirStat out of habit, but it's slow and I understand there are som faster alternatives:
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‎Jun 02, 2025
09:53 PM
Again: as far as the image goes, it doesn't matter whether you use Photoshop CS6 or the latest CC version. They display it exactly the same way, on any display.
The difference is only that with CS6, there is no way to scale up the interface separate from the image window. So on a 4K display, where everything is smaller because of the higher screen pixel density, the icons and menus can be impossible to read.
That's why you need to compensate by settting the display to half the resolution in Windows, effectively turning the 4K screen back into a standard HD screen. It doesn't reduce the quality as such - it's just a lot of wasted money; you could just as well have bought a standard display at half the price.
The camera you use is unrelated to this. It's just a question of how big a slice of the image you can see at native resolution. It's often important in Photoshop to view at 100% to properly assess sharpness and noise, and get reliable adjustment previews. With a high resolution screen, 100% will display a bigger slice of the full image.
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‎Jun 02, 2025
09:35 PM
Please do not start multiple threads with the same question. Any discussion should continue in the other thread.
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‎Jun 02, 2025
12:33 AM
Yes.
You're dumbing down your expensive 4K monitor to a standard HD monitor. It will now use four screen pixels to display one image pixel.
Photoshop isn't "designed" for any particular screen resolution. One image pixel is always represented by exactly one physical screen pixel - as long as you run the display at native resolution in the OS.
The 4K/retina support added in Photoshop from 2014 never did anything to the image - after all, you want to exploit that higher screen resolution. 4K support is only about scaling up the UI so you can read it.
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‎Jun 01, 2025
09:51 PM
1 Upvote
Liquify is a direct (destructive) pixel edit. Pixels are permanently changed.
You might be able to reverse the effect, but it would be double destruction. Better to make an action/script that promotes Liquify to a separate layer. That should be pretty straightforward.
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‎Jun 01, 2025
09:31 PM
If you took D Fosse’s advice to get a laptop with a discrete Nvidia GPU of the 3xxx/4xxx series, Denoise would be well under 1 minute per image, probably under 20-30 seconds.
By @Conrad_C
A basic RTX 4060 will do 20MP in less than 10 seconds. So the question is how much slower the laptop models are.
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‎Jun 01, 2025
01:41 PM
It's not about two screens. It's about two graphics processors.
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‎Jun 01, 2025
12:58 PM
Not recommended. It may work, but not well. You need more powerful graphics from the Nvidia RTX series.
Note that dual graphics is always a potential conflict. Again, it may work, and it may not. It depends entirely on how the manufacturer has configured the two GPUs. It may be necessary to completely disable the integrated GPU.
Photoshop uses the GPU for actual data processing, and the result returned to Photoshop for further processing. It's not a simple downstream flow, it goes both ways. You can't send data to one GPU and get it back from the other. There can only be one GPU in that equation.
Any Nvidia RTX model, at nominal specs and configuration, should denoise 20MP in 5 to 10 seconds.
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‎Jun 01, 2025
12:51 PM
Scroll down to troubleshooting section 6 here, "Check and delete the TempDisableGPU3 or TempDisableGPU2 files":
https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/acr-gpu-faq.html
While you're there, I'd recommend reading the whole thing.
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‎Jun 01, 2025
10:46 AM
Open the CC desktop app and sign in. It sounds like you have been signed out somehow.
If you are signed in, sign out and back in again.
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